Former actress and Screen Actors Guild board member Marsha Hunt, from a cropped and electronically tweaked Wikimedia photo by Gazebo. Read one of the more conventional news stories about Ms. Hunt’s passing here.
Ugly old truths when freedom is on the line in the USA
by Eric Jackson
When you are my age and leftist politics have run in the family for three generations — back to the Wobblies and through the Young People’s Socialist League before I came along — then situations like this do shape an attitude about the FBI.
However, get educated in history and political science, formally but much more on the informal side that comes with activism, and then there come some certain understandings.
Like about the perverse nature of men like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, which perversion has nothing to do with their homosexuality except perhaps that Hoover was one to blackmail other gay men about their private lives.
Like the notion that, within the ranks of the Screen Actors Guild among other things its one-time president Ronald Reagan was a terrible scab.
Like about how the USA, despite the FBI’s criminal COINTELPRO conspiracy — to prevent the rise of a black messiah among other things — a large and prosperous nation like the USA does need an organized spy-catcher function which as things are set up is within the FBI’s bailiwick.
~
Put on my Panamanian citizen hat and my attitudes and understandings about the National Police have different particulars but run in parallel. As indeed the situation of Panama is different, but what happened to Father Héctor Gallego, Heliodoro Portugal and dozens of others are worse but akin offenses to what the FBI et al did to Marsha Hunt, Dorothy Parker, Dalton Trumbo and so many others in the creative pursuits in the USA. Closer analogies to some of the worst things that the dictatorship’s sapos did were an FBI informant in the assailants’ car when Viola Liuzzo was murdered, FBI and NYPD red squad agents on the scene when Malcom X was gunned down, the FBI / Chicago police death squad murder of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and so on.
~
Put on my progressive DEMOCRAT hat, and I WISH FOR, but DO NOT EXPECT, the Biden administration to say a few things about Marsha Hunt and what was done to her by the FBI and allied agencies.
Like to acknowledge who and what Roy Cohn was — among these things Donald Trump’s mentor and also a tormentor of so many who had worked as actors, directors, producers, writers and so on.
Like to figuratively spit in the faces of the likes of Ron DeSantis and retell the tale of what J. Edgar Hoover et al did to so many black people and organizations, to tell it as AMERICAN HISTORY even as today’s racists will denigrate that truth as “CRT.”
Especially like to draw the line between the lying oppressive authoritarianism that Americans have known and that the MAGAs would even more deeply embed in the fabric of a great nation, and a Democratic policy of exposing and rejecting that stuff and standing for freedom instead.
I have no idea of this woman’s and her family’s or friends’ funeral arrangements, but it would be so fitting and proper to see someone from the Biden administration give a eulogy, or make some other statement of analogous prominence, about the sad chapter that stunted Marsha Hunt’s professional life.
Contact us by email at fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
These links are interactive — click on the boxes
